20-Jul-12

Room To Grow

An apartment rented by Columbia transfer student Barack Obama is on the market.

Gawker summons up the truly unfortunate image of the future leader of the free world haunting these rooms, pulling the babes in his blue and white sarong, behavior which allegedly did transpire in later Obama apartments.

23-Apr-12

Castles In Dispair

The Times’ “Home” section usually sticks to house porn of the bold and the beautiful. The trouble comes when they wander into check-able facts.

The paper’s housing survey of America’s junior executives, the governors, revealed the shocking truth that many of them do not care for the Victorian glam of their official residences. I can’t speak to other cases, but almost everything in The Times’ two paragraphs on the Reagan’s Sacramento mansion debacle is wrong.

The article says

“Jerry Brown, who was criticized for not moving into state digs during his first stint as governor of California in the 1970s, turned out to be ahead of his time. When he returned to the post decades later, the mansion was gone — sold off to save money. (Mr. Brown now rents a 1,450-square-foot apartment in Sacramento.)”

As more “newsy” New York Times sections have reported in the past, the Reagans started this cavalcade shortly after taking office, refusing to live in the 19th Century splendor of California’s Governor’s Mansion and hurling California governors into decades of homelessness rootlessness.

Ronnie and Nancy lived in a rental, paid for by caring millionaire friends. And were criticized for it. Reagan pals also paid for a cheesy new suburban mansion with the muy, muy authentico name “Casa de los Gobernadores,” tragically incomplete when the Reagans left town. The new house never passed into state ownership, and Brown’s renting generated him largely positive press, much of it focused on an allegedly floor-based mattress.

Brown’s successor lived in another rental gifted by thoughtful moguls, as did his successors. When Arnold Shwarzenegger came to town the owner of the Reaganesque mansion made a failed push to sell it to the state, recalled in this intermittently working slide tour.

10-Jul-10

House Proud

A belated salute to the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, who July 4th shared with readers his meditations on America and the world’s obsession with replicating homes of the great and the good, or at least George Washington.

Mount Vernon, soon to host another superfluous “Presidential Library,” holds first place in the nation’s architectural imagination, or lack thereof. Kennicott spotlights the many sad recreations of the Big House, and Lydia Mattice Brandt’s research into America’s mysterious practice of making foreigners and school children troop through replicas at half a dozen World’s Fairs and exhibitions.

We Might Be Giants
Current star practitioner of this architectural ghost walking is Alan Greenberg, whose accomplishments include a toy house Mount Vernon for future Chief Executives with excess family cash, and a “flagship” store for the always strenuously patriotic Tommy Hilfiger.